The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  Siiri went out and caught the number 4 tram, accidentally ending up at the stop in front of Stockmann department store although she had intended to get off earlier and transfer to the number 10. She walked through the store, past the perfume counter and the magazine racks, to the stop on Mannerheimintie. The number 10 came quickly and she took it past the old Surgery Hospital, which wasn’t a hospital any more. She’d read in the paper that they were building new hospitals in Meilahti for hundreds of millions of euros so that they could move out of the beautiful old buildings. The more medicine progressed, the more expensive it became because people were healthier and didn’t die when they were supposed to any more.

  When the tram came back around to the Mannerheim statue, Siiri got on the number 6 and rode it to Hietalahti market square. That was where the old brick and stucco market hall designed by Selim A. Lindqvist was, the most beautiful market hall in Helsinki. On her way home she got off on Bulevardi and glanced in the window at Cafe Ekberg. She’d never been in, and she didn’t go in this time, either, although Irma always talked about how nice it was. Irma liked to go to the Ekberg with her old schoolmates.

  Siiri walked through the Plague Park to Yrjönkatu and stopped to look at Wäinö Aaltonen’s relief sculpture on the Suomi building, with its heavy horses and strange, ungainly angels. She continued to the Swimming Hall and couldn’t think of the architect’s name and wondered when she had last been swimming. But she couldn’t remember. Then she went around the back of the ugly Forum building and looked into the courtyard of the Amos Anderson Museum, and missed her husband, and turned onto Simonkatu, and finally arrived at the tram stop for her own number 4, in front of the Glass Palace.

  She almost fell asleep on the tram and was so tired when she got off that she stopped to catch her breath at the tram stop. She leaned on her cane and looked at Sunset Grove through the trees. It was a repulsive, 1970s concrete building with a flat roof and little windows. It was probably impossible to build anything beautiful out of concrete. Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an image of Tero, beautiful, long-haired Tero, hanged, came into her mind: his face swollen and distorted, his feet swinging loose in the air. She’d seen hanged people like that on television. But why did this horrible vision come to her so powerfully, so realistically? Even his familiar red checked shirt was vivid in her mind. She closed her eyes to get rid of the sight, but the image didn’t go away, the buzz in her head only grew louder. She started to feel dizzy, her cane fell out of her hand, and she had to hold on to the tram stop railing for support. She hoped her feeling of nausea wouldn’t make her vomit, and she realized she was crying.

  Chapter 10

  ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ rang brightly across the lobby of Meilahti Hospital. ‘Where have you been?’

  Irma had begun to get nervous waiting for Siiri and Anna-Liisa. She had arrived on time, contrary to habit, and ended up having to wait at the reception desk for nearly four minutes. The neighbourhood around the hospital had changed completely since the last time Siiri had been there, to see her husband, around the turn of the millennium. Without Anna-Liisa she never would have found the place, now called Meilahti Hospital, its entrance painted a ghastly orange.

  ‘It’s like walking into a metro station,’ Irma said.

  Irma found some art photographs of Helsinki on the wall and looked at them more closely to see if a tenth-generation Helsinkian would recognize anything in them. Anna-Liisa and Siiri weren’t interested in this game and went to find out what ward Olavi Raudanheimo was in. Siiri asked the attendant to write down the floor and room number on a slip of paper and with this they wandered down the hallway, following a white line painted on the floor, as they had been instructed.

  They walked along the line single file and felt like children holding a rope on a preschool outing to the zoo or the museum. Siiri had the idea that it might be a sobriety test, to see if they could walk in a straight line, like the tests police give to drivers. Maybe the hospital had painted the line on the floor so they could tell exactly how drunk their visitors were. Irma thought it was like walking a tightrope in the circus, but she had a hard time staying on the line and started to get so dizzy that she had to step off it.

  They continued onwards in this manner and didn’t notice where the line was taking them. When eventually they stopped to clear Irma’s head, they realized they were in the basement, although Olavi’s room was on the twelfth floor. They had to ask directions several times before they found him. Anna-Liisa found it hard to believe that they really needed to go down two floors before they could go up, and Irma wanted to ask a real doctor, preferably a medical professor, whether it mattered if they didn’t get there via the white line.

  ‘The staff are very friendly,’ Irma said, pleased. ‘Much nicer than at Sunset Grove. They stop and talk to you and look you in the eye.’

  Anna-Liisa was impressed, too. ‘They even speak Finnish. Did you notice that the last person we talked to used the formal you correctly? That’s unusual. I would have been impressed at the attempt even if he’d got it wrong.’

  When finally they reached Olavi, they found he had been given a good room with only four beds and a private toilet. It was quiet, too – no television blaring trivial chatter in a corner. And you could see a long way from the window, at least as far as Lauttasaari, if not all the way to Espoo. Siiri, Irma and Anna-Liisa admired the view and soon got into a quarrel over where the proper boundary of Töölö began, but then Olavi’s room-mate, who said he was a townie, intervened.

  ‘Stenbäckinkatu,’ he said, coughing loudly. ‘That’s the boundary of Töölö.’

  Anna-Liisa was obviously of a different opinion, and Irma was curious to know if the man was a drunk, since it seemed that the only people who called themselves townies were chronic alcoholics. But neither woman said anything because they remembered that they had come to see Olavi Raudanheimo, who was sitting in his bed looking very thin but perfectly alert.

  ‘You certainly have it good here,’ Irma began cheerfully, but Anna-Liisa got straight to the point, like a good interrogator.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she said. ‘Do you remember what happened afterwards? Were there any witnesses?’

  Siiri would have liked to ask about Reino as well, whether Olavi knew where he’d ended up. But it was hard for Olavi to answer any of their questions. He said he had been sent to the dementia section of the Group Home and that he was glad that he was at the hospital now. He didn’t remember anything about the Group Home and wouldn’t even know he’d been there if his son hadn’t told him.

  ‘The hospital examined me thoroughly and found out all kinds of things,’ he said almost proudly, as if he were talking about his accomplishments. He started boasting about his numerous cysts, hernias and blockages, and Anna-Liisa got impatient and demanded that he tell them how the criminal investigation was progressing.

  ‘We didn’t come here to listen to your medical history,’ she explained. Olavi looked frightened.

  Then he started to cry. He had a different way of crying to Reino. He didn’t bark or curse. He wept silently, holding it in and letting it out. Like something had grabbed him deep at the pit of his stomach. The alcoholic townie thought it best to go out on the balcony for a cigarette. It was hard to tell if the room’s other occupants were alive or not. So Olavi was able to tell them what had happened.

  ‘I had asked for a male nurse to help with my bathing and showering,’ he began. ‘Because it bothered me having a young woman assisting an ugly old man like me. I thought it was more natural to have a man do it. It never occurred to me that a male nurse would . . . somehow . . . think that he could . . .’

  He started to cry again. Irma patted his shoulder, Siiri held his hand, and Anna-Liisa straightened out his blanket.

  ‘We understand, Olavi,’ she said, as if she were an expert in such things. ‘And there’s such a serious shortage of male nurses, too.’

  Olavi said it was a new nurse named Jere, whose last
name he couldn’t remember, but his son had promised to find out. Since Jere was new, the social worker had to come with him.

  ‘There’s your witness!’ Siiri exclaimed.

  ‘No. He was the one who was . . . I was crying, asking them to let me out of the shower, and he just laughed . . . It was . . . terribly unpleasant . . . Do you believe me?’ He spoke quietly and looked at them and they could see the tremendous shame and embarrassment in his eyes. Irma dug her lace handkerchief out of her handbag and handed it to him.

  ‘Perhaps they are homosexuals,’ Anna-Liisa said.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Irma said. ‘Certainly not normal homosexuals, anyway.’ She blew her nose loudly.

  ‘I’m never going back to Sunset Grove,’ Olavi sighed. ‘But my son can’t take me in and I’m not sick enough to stay here in the hospital. Friends, where am I going to go?’

  His voice nearly faded away completely and he was left staring out of the window. They didn’t know what to say, they just stood in shock for what felt like an eternity while the silence grew heavier.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll think of something,’ Siiri said, not quite knowing what she meant, and fluffed his pillow.

  ‘Pasi was fired at the same time that Tero died. Or was it after he died? Does anybody know Pasi’s last name?’ Anna-Liisa said, making an effort to change the subject. Before anyone could respond, a heavy-set nurse wheeled a food trolley in with a terrible racket.

  ‘Maybe this isn’t such a high-quality place,’ Irma said when she saw the limp porridge.

  The nurse was sweaty and cross-looking. They felt like they ought to leave quickly, and were in such a hurry that they didn’t give Olavi a proper goodbye.

  On the tram Siiri realized she’d left her cane at the hospital and decided to go there first thing in the morning to get it. She always took care of unpleasant tasks sooner rather than later. It was easier than letting things pile up. Her son who died of alcoholism had always suffered less for what he’d done than for what he’d left undone. It was hard to understand how she could have raised him so badly. All her children, really, because it wasn’t quite healthy the way her daughter had taken up teaching yoga and then become a nun.

  Siiri didn’t really need her cane, but it was an expensive model and a gallant companion, as Irma put it.

  ‘My Carl the Cane always finds his way home,’ Irma said the next morning at coffee, as Siiri was getting ready to go and pick hers up.

  Siiri asked about her cane at the hospital reception desk but the girl there didn’t know how to help her. Siiri thought she’d left the cane in Olavi’s room with a view, so she decided to check there, if she could remember the way. She had some memory of it, but it was a vague kind of memory that she couldn’t swear to as fact. That must be what Irma was talking about when she said she’d ‘finessed’ something.

  Olavi Raudanheimo was happy when Siiri surprised him at his lunch. They served lunch very early in hospitals, which was probably good, since they woke the patients up so early in the morning. They had, in fact, poked Olavi awake an hour before breakfast that morning at half past five to take his temperature. He didn’t know why they did it since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a fever. But it was a compulsory procedure and there was no getting out of it. There was a white plate on his tray and on the plate was one potato and something grey.

  ‘Pork gravy, I think,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t see any meat in it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s to give you something to hope for,’ Siiri said, and Olavi laughed in his normal voice, but didn’t touch his food.

  They had such a pleasant time sitting and chatting that Siiri forgot why she had come and thought that she must have come to ask about Reino, since she’d forgotten to ask the day before. Olavi said that Reino had been sent to the closed unit’s severe dementia ward – Olavi’s son had found that out, too.

  ‘A healthy man, not even that old,’ Olavi said soberly. ‘Reino’s only eighty-seven, isn’t he?’

  Olavi was well-informed about everything. Siiri couldn’t understand how such a person could be mistaken for a halfwit. Even Alzheimer’s wouldn’t strike someone like a bolt of lightning. But Olavi said that anyone would seem demented if they were given enough medication.

  ‘That’s what my son said. There Reino sat tied to a wheelchair, unable to even remember his own name, a Russian nurse changing his nappy once a day and feeding him gruel with a spoon. What a fate for a veteran of the war.’

  Olavi’s son had rescued him from the closed unit by telling them that his father needed to go to the hospital for some tests, and once Olavi was out he’d recovered from his ‘dementia’ immediately.

  ‘It was a truly miraculous recovery! They won’t do anything here until they’ve peeled you off your medication. But Reino doesn’t have any children to help him. His only son died a couple of years ago from a heart attack while jogging. He’d suddenly taken up exercise, the lunatic.’

  When Olavi’s gravy had cooled and solidified, he moved it aside and picked up the newspaper. It was fun reading the news together. There was an article about an integrated retirement home built in combination with a children’s nursery. It sounded like a good idea to Siiri and Olavi. The children would brighten up the retirement home and the old people could help the overworked nursery staff with the babysitting. They could eat together, draw, sing, read, and they wouldn’t need to make up any activity busywork. But the paper said that they’d had to give up the experiment because there had been so many complaints from the children’s parents that the old people were a danger to the children because they were confused and unpredictable and taking strong medication.

  Siiri and Olavi laughed at that until the tears flowed. Then Siiri went away, without her cane. Although they couldn’t say ‘went away’ any more because it meant ‘died’. At Sunset Grove there’d been a nice woman who had moved into her own apartment on Solnantie because, as she put it, all the people at Sunset Grove were old and toothless. For a long time everyone thought she had died, until one day she appeared on the same tram as Siiri.

  ‘Oh, you aren’t dead, then,’ Siiri had said, thoughtlessly, and then she had hastened to explain, ‘They said you went away.’

  Chapter 11

  Irma had marked on her calendar that it was her turn to reserve a restaurant table for her next class reunion. She asked Siiri to come with her to reserve it because she’d decided that this time they would have the meeting in a real restaurant instead of Cafe Ekberg.

  ‘Come with you? Can’t you just call and reserve a table?’ Siiri said. She didn’t know Helsinki restaurants and wasn’t sure how she could help.

  ‘I’m not calling somewhere. I’m going in person. It’s more fun that way. And I have to try out the restaurant so I won’t embarrass myself by choosing a place with bad food. We can take a taxi.’ She was enthused at the idea.

  ‘Don’t you think a taxi’s too expensive?’ Siiri said, since Irma didn’t have any of the Ambassador’s taxi coupons. But Irma’s daughter had told her that now that she didn’t have a car she could afford to take a taxi every day. Siiri wasn’t used to calling a cab just like that. It made her feel a little guilty. But Irma was more carefree than Siiri was in many ways. She liked all kinds of little vices, like whisky and cigarettes.

  They went to the Sunset Grove information desk to ask them to call a taxi and were happy to see that for once there was someone at the counter.

  ‘Two euros,’ the woman said before picking up the phone.

  ‘I see. So it costs the same as one emptying of the rubbish,’ Irma said, and cheerfully handed her a fifty-euro note.

  ‘Don’t you have anything smaller?’ Siiri said in horror, and Irma said that when you get money out of the wall it only dispenses large bills. There was nothing she could do about it.

  They got a taxi, but a problem arrived with it. There was a large-breasted, naked woman painted on the side of the car with a phone number for sex services. Siir
i felt that they couldn’t take such a porn-mobile, but Irma told her to stop being silly; no one was going to mistake them for sex workers.

  ‘Or customers!’ Irma said with a hearty laugh and sat down on a large stain in the back seat of the taxi.

  The next problem was where to go. Irma asked the driver if he could recommend a nice restaurant for students from the class of 1940, but the man clearly wasn’t from Helsinki. Then Irma remembered the Lehtovaara.

  ‘What’s the address?’ the driver asked. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared straight ahead.

  ‘Well, it’s on Mechelininkatu. On the corner of Mechelin and something, right near the Töölö library,’ Irma said as she put on her lipstick. With that information you would have thought that the taxi would get moving, but the driver demanded the address again. He had a little gadget on the dashboard where apparently he had to type in the exact address before he could start driving.

  ‘Goodness,’ Irma said, snapping her compact mirror shut. ‘Type in “Mechelininkatu eight”. That’s with a C H.’

  ‘Is it eight C or eight H?’

  ‘Not the address, the spelling. Try eight A.’

  And so the taxi started off, but the address she’d given him was wrong, of course. She gave a shout when they passed the furniture store on Mechelininkatu and told the driver to stop. But the man said that he couldn’t turn left until he got to Mechelininkatu 8, and stubbornly continued driving.

  ‘So this is what it’s like to go by taxi,’ Siiri said triumphantly. If she’d had her way, they would have taken the tram.

  ‘It’s not usually like this. This fellow isn’t quite qualified for the job,’ Irma said in a low voice. She glanced out of the window and waved her arm with its rattling bracelets in front of Siiri’s face. ‘Look! Quick! See how the Sibelius monument is gleaming in the sunshine? What a marvellous sculpture! You’d never see this riding the scram. And it won’t take you anywhere near Restaurant Lehtovaara.’